


Zero Punctuation: Sburb

by liquidCitrus, mellonbread



Category: Homestuck, Zero Punctuation
Genre: Gen, Reviews, SBURB, Video & Computer Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 16:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16685332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellonbread/pseuds/mellonbread
Summary: Sburb is - actually let’s not gloss over that name. Sburb? Is that what happens when you try to name your game by putting cheese spread on a keyboard and letting a dog at it? Whatever. Autocorrect is an open world sandbox game taking place on the set of Mario Galaxy, supplemented with a glass of milk Skyrim left out for two weeks.(Canon-typical swearing, absurd similes, cynicism. The opinions expressed here are not mine. The writing style isn’t mine either.)





	Zero Punctuation: Sburb

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the text: liquidcitrus; proofreading for sufficient Yahtzeeism and about 15% of the text: mellonbread. In the same genre as [I think we may have finally reached the limit of Open World games](https://archiveofourown.org/works/334820), although not quite close enough to merit a proper inspired-by byline.
> 
> Some part of my brain started talking in Zero Punctuation voice a while ago, and wouldn't stop until I wrote this. Mostly because, if I don't write it, at this point in Homestuck's lifespan nobody else will write it either. Which is a pity, really; Yahtzee's authorial voice is not that far away from Hussie's.
> 
> With apologies to Jenna.

So here’s some background. After a dozen meteors from space landed on Skaianet’s development offices and the homes of many of its staff the day after their E3 trailer, people started saying that its development was cursed, and honestly now that I’ve seen the game they probably deserve it. I wasn’t even going to review this game, what with the forced multiplayer and all that, but not only did you blow up my Twitter inbox, someone managed to convince Skaianet to send me twelve gold-plated copies of the game, so you have forced my hand. And if the world’s really ending, then I may as well produce this anyway, so you fucks can have something entertaining to watch in the few days remaining before the destruction of civilization.

Sburb is - actually let’s not gloss over that name. Sburb? Is that what happens when you try to name your game by putting cheese spread on a keyboard and letting a dog at it? Whatever. Autocorrect is an open world sandbox game taking place on the set of Mario Galaxy, supplemented with a glass of milk Skyrim left out for two weeks. What’s more, Skaianet has tried to solve the problem of poor immersion in VR and motion controls by inventing a fucking holodeck, which means I can’t even ignore the meatsuit I use as a hat rack anymore, making it not only a shitty game but the worst fitness app to ever have existed.

Autocollate's beginning is incomprehensible, which is good preparation for what will follow later. After I wrangled the thoroughly user-unfriendly terminal interface into letting me connect with one of my friends, I was surprised by the sound of something thumping in the other room. My friend then inexplicably apologized for breaking my coffee table, which I was puzzled by until he said that the game let him put things in my house. So I checked. My thoroughly reasonable response to a random machine appearing in my living room later, I was presented with a timer and a high risk of seizures in vulnerable populations. After losing a brass doorknocker and my father’s pornography collection to the lightshow, it took on the appearance of a metal statue of a giant’s cock that only spoke in sexual innuendos. After that, I was handed a box with a statue of Channing Tatum and a dozen bollocks and told to solve for X. I eventually resorted to trying every combination until something worked. I can’t tell you what happened next, because I honestly don’t know what happened, but after the dust cleared, the rest of my house was transported to an endless void.

My spirit cock proceeded to whisper this game’s deep lore into my ear while I attempted to navigate the Escher painting’s worth of stairs that my friend put on the roof of my house, and frankly, most of that deep lore isn’t worth listening to, so let me summarize it for you. There’s some sort of game of five-dimensional hyperchess going on, the white chesspieces are trying to help you finish the game, and the black chesspieces want to dump you into a pot of overcooked spaghetti with keysmashes for names. Also the world you came from is ending or something, and your objective is to create a new universe and become its gods, which is an end I could get behind, assuming I can ever finish this game.

Autocorrectal Exam calls the chesspieces Carapaces, and they are the brand of NPC that have a hundred individuals but only about five personalities. There’s the gruff single-minded one, the lolrandom idiot one, the one that wants nothing more than to cling onto your back and drink every drop of liquid that comes out of your knob, the one that is dignified and polite and might slip poison into your tea, and the one that wants to give you new bodily orifices. The other species of NPC populating this world are Consorts, and their personalities are so flat that I suspect someone fed their brains through a pasta roller. The Consorts had their worlds ruined by something called a Denizen, and want you to fix it by collecting a thousand sprigs of parsley or something.

Automatic claims to be a unique open-world narrative experience about personal development. As always, “narrative” open-world games make as much sense as “fashionable” muumuus, and thus Autokaleidoscope is actually a linear game with an unreasonable amount of walking between its story sections. You know the drill. Towers, insistent NPCs telling you where the plot is, vapid sidequests, crafting system.

It’s at least an unusual crafting system with a surprising amount of depth, because you play the piano to punch holes in cards and then use a miniature helipad to 3D print your new potted plant. Layering and double-punching cards allows you to combine items to get new ones, which are a blend of the characteristics of the items you combined, with a startlingly wide set of possible results. I spent quite a while coming up with new combinations, trying to goad the system into giving up and spawning an error item, but every combination I tried gave a valid result - highlights included a remote control helicopter with blender blades instead of propellers, a tin can of hand lotion with a special prize hidden inside, and a large plush duck with all its limbs replaced by analog sticks. (Sure, I could just get an error item by inputting complete nonsense instead of a valid code, but that’s no fun. It’s like turning on debug mode in a Sonic game and then claiming that being able to place yourself inside walls is a glitch.) Crafting is also the main way to gain new weapons. You craft said weapons by combining your main weapon with whatever you happen to have lying around the house, and hoping that you can afford the resulting fedora sawblades.

Speaking of which, the combat system is strangely unsatisfying. You are presented with the ability to use anything as a weapon, with the stipulation that you can only use one category of "anything" and will never be able to change it again. Not that I figured this out until reading about it in online guides. Combat consists of flailing at the enemy until you deplete its hit points, which doesn’t even result in a gratifying squelch as imp body parts impact upon the floor because the enemies immediately explode into a handful of Lego pieces and fruit snacks. There's also a PVP system, in the same way that an American school is technically a PVP zone: It wasn't expressly intended by the designers, so much as it represents one of the many consequences of all the glorious freedom you've been given.

My spirit cock tells me that I am a Left Buttock of Hope and that this gives me magic powers, and if you know me you’d know that hope is not exactly something I bother using very much, so let’s call it Jaded Annoyance, instead. I opened my skill tree and proceeded to note that the only skill I could unlock was the ability to use Jaded Annoyance to dry-clean my socks. I unlocked it, and then the game proceeded to excitedly tell me that I was five more points away from unlocking the ability to use Jaded Annoyance to toast bread. I was going to ignore the unlocks after that, but then I saw that I was only a few tiers away from unlocking the ability to shoot beams of Jaded Annoyance from my eyes. It sounded good, but after buying it I quickly found out that this game goes for realism and glowing eyebeams make you blind for a good minute afterwards. So I turned on auto allocation and ignored the whole thing so it would stop bugging me about unused points. An option I appreciate having, but it only papers over the flaws of your usual useless-skill-unlock-system.

Automobile prioritizes such things as “personal development” and “story” by having a system where the game over happens at a set time, whether you are doing the story quests or are just fucking around, and if you aren't at the endgame by then, sucks to be you! This system is as hamfisted as a disinterested wrestler using Christmas roasts as boxing gloves, but at least it warns you it's doing that because a prominent timer is hidden away in the depths of the Veil where nobody will ever go, a place I only ever checked out because the voices in my head suggested trying to see if I could find a way to clip out-of-bounds.

Afterwards, I tried killing the Consorts, which was slightly more amusing because of their bugged ragdoll physics, and in this way discovered that quest-giving Consorts - and only quest-giving Consorts - are immortal, and promptly exploited this to minimize the number of idiots yelling at me that I’m the hero of something. Sure, the quest-givers cry about the rest of their village being dead, but give them enough wind-up talking bookshelves and they will forget all that and promise you a reward to retrieve their now nonexistent children.

Oh, right, Autonomous was supposed to be a multiplayer game. But it’s not just private multiplayer. Some viewers may recall my review of Demon's Souls, a game where players in other dimensions and worlds could leave cryptic messages for you on the ground regarding the hazards lying in wait up ahead. Not to be outdone, Sburb allows players from other dimensions and worlds to send you cryptic Discord messages calling you gay.

Is Autofellatio worth playing? I genuinely don't know. On the one hand, it claims to be the only way to escape the apocalypse, and its crafting system is impressively deep. On the other hand... all the rest of its gameplay is shit on a shingle, it focuses too much on a generic story about you becoming less of a prick, and killing off most of humanity is an improvement on the status quo. I suppose it is at least fun with friends, and no, that's not a compliment, because shoveling dog turds off the local beaches can also be fun with friends. You can climb on things and jump off things and fly around and generally have a rip roaring good time firing brightly colored Photoshop filters at one another, but the most enjoyable part of the experience always ends up being sitting around over a beer and shooting the shit. You know, the exact thing I enjoyed doing in the real world before the game _burned down the fucking pub_.

**Author's Note:**

> (if you want to podfic this, you absolutely have permission and also I will love you forever)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Zero Punctuation: Sburb](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16797421) by [Benedict_SC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Benedict_SC/pseuds/Benedict_SC), [liquidCitrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus)




End file.
